No. 1 in Insurance

Scott Peyree's first company, an online marketing firm called WorldClass Strategy, survived the dot-com crash by creating EarnMyDegree.com, a website on which visitors could browse course listings from the University of Phoenix, Kaplan, and other education companies. By the end of 2003, Peyree had shed all his noneducation clients except one, an insurance brokerage, which he felt was too large to give up. He launched another portal, QuoteWizard.com, on which consumers shop for coverage, and eventually spun it out into a separate company. When WorldClass Strategy was sold in 2007, most of Peyree's partners, including his brother, stayed on as executives. But Peyree believed the insurance market offered a bigger opportunity. The site now has a network of 3,000 agents, who pay for customer referrals, and delivers 125,000 quotes a month to visitors. By 2009, all of Peyree's former business partners had joined the company.